Unfortunately I don't have much choice in supporting these apps: both because users want them and because they work better than their non-evil competition. I wish gnash was better, but in my experience it's a poor substitute. I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure that no PDF reader other than Acrobat even comes close to supporting the full PDF standard (and a nasty mess the standard is: I don't really blame other authors).
Surprisingly, 32-bit flash in a 64-bit wrapper worked great for my users during the time when Adobe had no official 64-bit support. Here's a short write-up of what I did: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2010/06/msg00849.html Similarly, I've had no problems running 32-bit Acrobat on a 64-bit system in ~2 years. Do you know of any issues off-hand that I should be concerned about? I actually don't know why skype is evil. I just googled it, but I'd be interested in hearing why you think skype is evil. Thanks for your take on multiarch, I will keep an eye on it :-) -Chris On Feb 23, 2012, at 5:33 PM, Bob Proulx wrote: > Chris Hiestand wrote: >> Bob Proulx wrote: >>> Out of curiosity, what are you using libc6-i386 for on your amd64 >>> machine? >> >> To run 32-bit apps. When I need to build a 32-bit app I just switch to a >> 32-bit machine or VM. I've had to support several 32-bit apps in the past >> and present including: >> skype > > You realize that skype is one of those evil applications! A kitten > dies every time another user signs up for it. :-) > >> acrobat reader >> adobe flash player >> (and a handful of other more custom apps) > > Those used to be very problematic on anything other than 32-bit. They > seem to be working okay in 64-bit native at the moment. Might change > at any time. There are many good native PDF readers available. Flash > is still iffy. Gnash works okay but isn't 100% yet. I still hate > flash sites due to problems with flash even on its native platform. > > I had been using a chroot for those 32-bit applications. But not > currently needing one for any of those reasons now. > >> Usually the "quick and dirty" solution is just enough to get these >> apps running on an amd64 machine. Fortunately a lot of these apps >> have moved to 64-bit architecture, so the "quick and dirty" solution >> is less useful; just when Debian is finally capable of doing things >> right. However I have a feeling multi-arch will be useful in the >> future. > > I am not looking forward to multiarch. I think it is going to be more > trouble than it is worth. It sounds simple in concept. But the > implementation leads to many tradeoffs and compromises. For anyone > who doesn't want multiarch it is going to introduce problems and > overhead that they don't need. > >> I plan to revisit this when it's time to upgrade to wheezy stable. > > Good deal. > > Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/69738421-e022-44f5-b27e-aed34add1...@salk.edu
